Alleged Grave-Robbing Cannibal Brothers Arrested — Again

Below:

Next story in Science

It's possible that some people, after dining on human flesh,
develop a real taste for it.

Two brothers in Pakistan — Mohammad Arif and Farman Aliwere
— were reportedly arrested in 2011 on charges of digging up about
100 graves and stealing the bodies, which they later allegedly
consumed, according to NBC
News.

"We got news this morning that they are up to their old ways,"
Chief Constable Zafar Iqbal of the Bhakkar district police said,
as quoted by NBC. Police raided the home of the notorious pair
yesterday (April 14), where authorities found the severed head of
a young boy. [ The
10 Weirdest Ways We Deal With the Dead ]

Because Pakistan has no specific laws against cannibalism, the
brothers' arrest in 2011 resulted in no more than a two-year
prison sentence and a fine. Local residents held a raucous
protest upon the duo's release in 2013, according to
The Express Tribune.

Cannibalism around the world

Reports
of cannibalism have been making headlines in recent
years, prompting some people to wonder if the grisly practice is
becoming more popular. In 2011, a man identified as Nikolai
Shadrin was arrested in Russia after police found a stew
made of human liver in the man's refrigerator.

That same year, a man from eastern Slovakia was arrested in
connection with attempted cannibalism. The Slovakian was accused
of planning to kill and eat a Swiss man as part of a pact the two
made via the Internet. It was later discovered that this was not
the Slovakian's first encounter with cannibalism.

News reports from North
Korea have suggested that cannibalism has occurred in the
famine-stricken totalitarian regime in recent years. One report
from the British newspaper The Sunday Times stated that a
man was put to death after officials discovered he had killed and
cooked two of his own children.

Another report details the arrest of a North Korean man who
allegedly dug up the body of his dead grandchild and ate the
flesh. Elsewhere, a man who reportedly killed 11 people and sold
their remains as "pork" was executed by a firing squad.

And in
Papua New Guinea, a large island nation north of Australia,
the father of a 3-year-old girl was accused in 2013 of taking his
daughter into a wooded area and biting into her neck, eating the
flesh and sucking her blood, according to the Papua New Guinea
Post-Courier.

As gruesome as the incident was, it's not an isolated event,
according to other reports from Papua New Guinea. The relatively
unexplored country is home to millions of people who live in
isolated rural villages and maintain traditional practices that
may sometimes include cannibalism.

An ancient hunger

Evidence of cannibalism isn't limited to the modern era, either.
Neanderthals suffered periods of starvation and may have
supplemented their diet through cannibalism, according to a 2006
study of 43,000-year-old skeletal remains from northwestern
Spain.

"There is strong evidence suggesting that these Neanderthals were
eaten," the study's lead author, Antonio Rosas of the Museo
Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid, told Live Science in an
earlier interview. "That is, long bones and the skull were broken
for extraction of the marrow, [which] is very nutritious."

Researchers in 2010 saw bite marks on 12,000-year-old
human bones from Gough's Cave in England and 800,000-year-old
remains from the extinct human species Homo
antecessor at the Gran Dolina site in Spain that were
likely caused by human teeth.

"They could've been under major stress over resources, and
nutritional cannibalism may have been an adaptation for it,"
paleoanthropologist Briana Pobiner of the Smithsonian
Institution, who did not take part in this study, told Live
Science in an earlier interview.

Prison fare doesn't compare

While incarcerated from 2011 to 2013, the two Pakistani brothers
who have been accused of cannibalism spent most of their sentence
in King Edward Medical University in Lahore. There, they were
reportedly being examined by the school's neurophysiology
department.

Though the brothers are once again behind bars, they're
apparently refusing all prison food.

"Neither one of them wanted to eat anything we offered," said
Mukhtar Hussain of the Bhakkar police department.